By Shaenon K. Garrity

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This strip is just here to move the plot along, although Dave identifying himself as not only evil, but more evil than a demon, is pretty interesting. Then again, it’s not like Caliban is an especially evil demon. He tries, but not very hard.

I realize now that my concept of monsters in kids’ rooms is influenced by the several dozen times I saw “Poltergeist” as a kid. It used to be on HBO, like, all the time. I thought it was a comedy except for the scene where a guy peels his face off.

I wrote this one long after most of the strips in this storyline, mainly as a way of getting Artie into the story. He isn’t in this story much.

In a much later Narbonic strip, Mell comments that Dave needed the ladies’ civilizing influence. Mell’s not the most trustworthy judge, though.

This is one case where the technobabble really is technobabble. Because mitochondria are genetically weird (they have their own genetic material separate from the rest of the cell), they’re a popular choice for technobabble explanations in science fiction. I was probably thinking of Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time books. The ansible is an enormously useful fictional device invented by Ursula K. LeGuin and used by many, many science-fiction writers; it’s the thing that allows planets and spaceships to communicate instantaneously even when they’re light-years apart.

The backgrounds here are all based on panels from “Alley Oop.” I was totally into “Alley Oop.”

I thought it was important to clarify that, although Helen knows that Dave is unstuck in time, she can’t figure out exactly when and where he is or see anything he sees. This comes up again later in the storyline, so I must have been worried that people might be confused.

The art in this week of strips is pretty good. It’s nice that I bothered to draw backgrounds and weird little mad-scientific devices. Good one, me.

I can’t remember where I got the “synchronicity” idea. Even when I was drawing these strips, I couldn’t quite remember. A lot of the strips in this storyline were written almost exactly ten years ago, when I was still in college, and they’re mysterious and baffling to me today.

I remember the second panel of this being virtually identical to the thumbnail. Getting Helen’s crude doodle of Dave right was crucial.

In the first panel you can see copies of Maniagnosis and The New Journal of Malology, the two mad-science journals that appear most often in Narbonic.

Let’s face it, there’s no other way this situation could have played out.

They’ve simply realised that Dave really needs the costume of a time traveler.

Since the entire ‘Get a Life’ arc is evidence for mind-body dualism, I can’t help but wonder where Dave’s mind is right now. Is it still in his present brain, while all of his senses and impulses are temporally displaced? Or is his astrally projected ghost lurching through the years, leaving his corporeal husk entirely dispossessed?

Put on the funny top hat and the glasses too!Get out the greasepaint and the clown-y suit!Now get the Lady Clairol, dye his hair all blue!His face we’ll ink,Paint his toenails pink,‘Cause I really think he looks cute!We’re gonna use his carcass for a puppet show!He’ll do a Shakespeare monologue to boot!Yeah, he’ll be pissedThat the fun he missed,But we can’t resist! It’s sublime!And he’s out of luck, ’cause he’s unstuck in time!

Is Mell seriously scrawling “Property of M.K” on our dashing daredevil’s cheeks? Any moment now she’ll drag him into a doll’s tea party. (…which would remind us of the webcomic’s faint recurring Wonderland metaphor.)

One of the unspoken assumptions of most fictional varieties of time travel, and an assumption that Dave’s ‘mind-travel’ had avoided until now, is that there is such thing as a “same location”. Party poopers are quick to chirp up that the Earth orbits the sun at nineteen miles per second, (“so it’s reckoned”) and the sun is moving at forty thousand miles per hour, so no location can really be called the “same” for any meaningful length of time. (And that’s not even getting into special relativity.)

…So let’s instead assume something else: that since Dave’s temporal problem is mostly mental, then this synchronicity solution is psychological rather than physical. By forcing his mind to experience identical conditions in all timelines, he will lose his newfound ability to distinguish between them and, henceforth, only experience the vector addition of the timelines (which is, hopefully, the present).

Even operating on the more “hard” concept of locations never being the same, that concept never actually matters: It only has to be the same RELATIVELY.

If a single point is the same relative to enough frames of reference (for example, most major co-ordinates of the planets crust, which are relative stillpoints to the earth’s core) then that is more then enough for technology advanced enough to cause time travel in the first place.

Also Leon, yes, that is Artie getting the line– He even has little “shout lines”, which I find cute.

Synchronicity is mentioned a LOT in Hellblazer. John Constantine uses it to get where he wants to go, or, more often, where he needs to be.

It’s used similarly in the Unknown Armies RPG, as a Pornomancer (mage that gets magical power from re-enacting scenes from certain porn movies. Yes, it’s a bizzare game) significant spell, which, as in the comic, gets the Adept where they need to be. I’m fairly sure they got it from Hellblazer, though.

Five, ten, fifteen, thenWhen it’s been twenty years, we’ll see Dave again!Then Mell and Helen will be telling of the spellingTo escort Davenport, thru the time stream propelling!Now Dave is here, but I fear that I lost it!I shoulda wrote, made a note or used a Post-It!Don’t condemn her, she really can’t rememberThe word that she heard, how absurd!

I think that it was so-ci-o-lo-gy …Or maybe it was spe-lae-o-lo-gy …I get the sense that sen-si-bi-li-tyIs wrong, but sounds so-phis-ti-ca-ted, see?I know for sure it’s not psy-cho-lo-gy,Although it sounds the same, it starts with “p”!We gotta find the syl-la-bles sublimeTo help you get your fat butt back in time!

I seem to remember consistency requiring the existance of versions of the future (never shown at all) which were dystopian but where Dave never smoked. But now I want to see the non-dystopian version of this part of the future, where Dave is clueless and everyone is mean to him to preserve the non-dystopian future. And, of course, because being mean to Dave when he’s clueless is fun.